Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (72 page)

"Well," Stasi said. "These things happen." Easy enough to imagine that boy instead, some quiet upper crust boy who'd been in the Russian army. He wasn't like anyone real.

"I'm still sorry," Mitch said. "Bad things oughtn't happen to someone like you."

"Darling, I'm the very definition of someone to whom bad things happen," Stasi said airily. "I'm a bad thing waiting to happen."

His blue eyes focused very seriously on her face. "Doesn't that get tiring?" he asked quietly.

Stasi leaned back against the window, between him and the side of the streetcar, glancing out at houses darkened against the night. "You have no idea, darling." Bone tired, all the way to the core. "You run and you run and you run and you stay one step ahead, knowing one day you'll stay too long. One day you'll miss a step and then there's nothing under you but air."

He squeezed her hand. "Air's ok if you've got enough lift."

She laughed and rested her head against the glass. "I expect you'd say that, being a pilot. I bet you love the air."

"It's the only thing worth living for," he said.

"Then why wasn't it tonight?" Stasi asked. His hand was cold in hers. "Do you think that might have something to do with the necklace in your pocket?"

"What necklace?"

"Never mind." Stasi shook her head. Some kind of lunatic fugue. There wasn't going to be any sense out of him. She'd call his team's hotel and see if she could get Mrs. Segura, but that would require a telephone, and if she left him alone long enough to make the call she'd probably lose him again. And the necklace. Was the necklace this bad, or was it just that he was on the edge to start with?

There was a long silence. "Do I know you from somewhere?" Mitch asked curiously.

"My name is Stasi," she said.

"G
arden District?" Lewis said, squinting at the map. "He's way down there now. That's quite a ways."

Alma blew out a deep breath. "Ok, time for a cab."

"Going where?"

Alma pointed somewhere in the general vicinity. "Pick a street," she said. "Or how about Kindred Hospital? There are reasons why people might take a taxi to a hospital in the middle of the night."

"That does it for me," Lewis said. "It's that or Lafayette Cemetery."

"Please not a cemetery," Alma said. "Do we have to be that gothic?"

"You tell me," Lewis said. "Would Mitch go hang out in a cemetery in the middle of the night?"

Alma looked sober. "He might," she said. "I have no idea where he might go. He probably…" Alma glanced away, shaking her head. "After he got back from Europe he wandered around for a while. Gil would get telegrams from him from random places, New York, New Orleans, Fort Worth… I asked him about it later and he said he didn't remember where he'd been. That he'd genuinely forgotten." She took a deep breath. "That worried me, of course. But as far as I know it never happened again."

"It takes you that way sometimes," Lewis said, and he did know. "You see things you just can't think about anymore, so you forget. You've got to. If you remembered you'd just keep on remembering. So you don't. You shut it off and put it in a box."

Al nodded. "I get that. I just don't know what's happened now."

"The necklace opened the box," Lewis said grimly.

T
here was a house. It was three blocks from the streetcar line, down a tree lined side street. No lights shone in the windows. Why would they? It was three o'clock in the morning. It was a very nice house, Stasi thought. It had double porches and a wrought iron fence, the finials of the posts decorated like the Berlin Iron of the necklace. The paint was faded in places, and there was a crack in one of the bricks of the walk. Time didn't stand still, and here like everywhere there were the marks of the Depression, paint jobs deferred, minor repairs left for another, more prosperous day.

"Is this your house?" Stasi asked quietly as Mitch opened the iron gate. A little faded sign by the gate proclaimed its name: Eden.

"No," he said. His voice was also low. "I'm just staying here."

"Oh." Friends of his. That would be good. Perhaps they'd have a telephone and know what to do. Stasi followed him up the walk and up the five brick steps onto the porch. Bougainvillea bushes grew up around it and jasmine twined around the columns, small white blossoms lending fragrance to the night.

Mitch knocked on the door. "Milly?"

There was no answer. The house was quiet. The neighborhood was quiet. Not a dog barked. There were no sounds of cars, no sound but the wind through the branches of the big old trees.

"Milly?" Mitch knocked again.

"She's probably asleep," Stasi whispered. "It's three in the morning."

"Milly!" He raised his voice, banging on the door with his fist. "Let me in! Milly!"

"Maybe we should come back later," Stasi said. "Mitch…"

"Milly! Milly! Open the door!"

At this rate someone in the neighborhood would be calling the cops. "I think we should…" Stasi began.

"Milly! Open up! Milly!"

The door opened and for a moment Stasi stood there speechless. There was a man in a bathrobe, a flashlight in his hand, which he shone in their faces. "Milly doesn't live here anymore," he said genially. "She moved to Bienville Parish when she got married ten years ago."

Mitch flinched at the light. "Married? Ten years ago?"

The light played over his face. "Mitchell Sorley," the man said evenly. "Well, this is a surprise."

"Jeff," Mitch said.

The light hit her in the eyes. "And Miss Ivanova. An even better surprise. Should I trust you've brought my necklace?"

"Mr. Lanier," Stasi said, and was proud that she could toss her head.

"You know each other?" Mitch asked.

"He's the man who hired me to find Kershaw's necklace," Stasi said.

"My necklace," Lanier said sharply. "It was in my family for a hundred years before Milly sold it. She had no right. She sold it and kept the money for herself, used it to help that husband of hers open a car dealership! She had no right at all." He smiled at Stasi. "So I hired you to get it back, fair and square. Have you got it?"

Stasi nodded.

Mitch looked at her. "You have Milly's necklace?"

"It's not Milly's," Lanier snapped. "It belongs to the family. She had no right to sell it."

"Mr. Lanier," Stasi began. "There's a curse on it, you see…"

"I know all about the curse," he said, holding out his hand. "We all do. Believe me, no one will be more careful with the necklace than I."

Mitch shook his head. "I thought you'd gone into a sanitarium. That's what Milly said."

Lanier's face changed, hardened. "She put me in one after the war. That wasn't right either. It wasn't right, locking her own brother up like that! She blamed me, you see, for what you did."

"Milly was a good person," Mitch said. His voice slurred a little, much the worse for drink.

"Milly was a spoiled little brat," Lanier snapped. "I never told on you. I never ratted you out. You were my brother in arms, and I never said a word."

"Jeff," Mitch said. "No."

Lanier looked at Stasi. "Has he told you? Has he told you what he is? Leading Milly on, getting his jollies on the sickness of it all?"

"No," Mitch said quietly. "That wasn't what happened."

"Has he told you?" Lanier shouted. "Has he told you he's a goddamned eunuch? He had his balls shot off in the war. I let him stay with me, brother in arms, and he went after my sister and then when he couldn't get it done, he moved on to carving up whores in Storyville with an axe!"

Mitch opened his mouth but nothing came out, and Stasi flinched.

"Give me the necklace!" Lanier shouted. "Give it to me now!"

Mitch rushed him.

Lanier hadn't seen it coming and Mitch was bigger, a tackle that sent the flashlight flying and both of them crashing into the door.

"Oh hell," Stasi said, and got out of the way. The necklace spilled out of Mitch's pocket, glittering cold and evil on the boards of the porch. She scooped it up.

Lanier scrambled up, grasping for something inside the door, a small trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth. "I'll kill you," he said. "I will." Something equally dark and deadly glimmered in his hand as he rummaged on the hall table.

"Come on!" Stasi grabbed Mitch by the hand, dragging him to his feet and down the steps. The shot went over their heads, slicing through the leaves of the tree above as they ran for their lives.

L
ewis tensed, his head going up like a hunting dog's. "That was a shot," he said.

"North of here," Alma said. They stood on the sidewalk a block from Kindred Hospital, watching the tail lights of the cab disappear.

"You want to bet?" Lewis asked.

"I wouldn't bet against it," Alma sighed. They must have covered sixty blocks tonight, all told. Running was out of the question, but they could probably manage a brisk walk. "Let's go."

W
ell, Stasi thought, I'm in a cemetery in the middle of the night with an axe murderer. Life does have its little quirks.

They'd run down first one street and then another, dodging one more shot and trying to stay in the shadow of the trees, but short of barging into a house there really wasn't much cover. Of course there were bushes and plants, fences and flowers, but they were as much hindrance as help. Blossoms fell, leaving a trail. Roots were something to trip over. And towering live oaks didn't provide much of a place to hide unless you were Tarzan, which she decidedly wasn't. Ducking behind a tree truck might work for a pursued ingénue in the movies, but it didn't work in real life, not for two people with one of them drunk and both of them winded. The gates of Lafayette Cemetery offered the perfect refuge.

Unlike most cemeteries Stasi had seen in the United States, Lafayette Cemetery seemed mostly above ground rather than a graveyard. Mausoleums large and small glimmered white in the dark, marble reflecting palely. It was like a city of the dead, streets green with grass between crumbling monuments, walls of vaults stacked four high, each body behind a neat plaque. It was like cemeteries in Europe meant for feasting the dead on tombstones with walks where children could run shouting between the bones of their ancestors. There were plenty of places to hide. Unfortunately it was a little hard to hide when you had an axe murderer noisily being sick on a wrought iron fence beside you.

Stasi looked anxiously up and down the "street." Not a shadow moved. The mausoleums were silent, their white edges marked sharp against the dark of a few towering magnolia trees. Perhaps they'd lost him. It was possible.

Mitch straightened up. "I feel better," he said. Whether that was the result of being sick or getting rid of the necklace was a moot point.

"Good," Stasi said.

There was a step, a sudden movement, and a bullet came singing along the row, plunking into a mausoleum, sending shards of the facing marble flying. Mitch knocked her flat between two platform tombs.

"Ow," Stasi said.

"Keep your head down!"

"I'm keeping it down!"

"And be quiet!"

"You were the one who started talking!"

"He has a gun and we don't," Mitch said. He was rather heavy to have on top of one. Also, he didn't smell particularly good.

"Oh well observed! I hadn't noticed he had a gun," Stasi whispered furiously.

Footsteps coming closer.

"How about we get out of here?"

"What an idea!"

Mitch clambered to his feet and she dragged herself after him, dodging around the corner of a mausoleum just as Lanier reached the end.

"I know you're here," he called. "Miss Ivanova, I've got no quarrel with you. You can leave if you want. This is between me and Mitchell Sorley."

Stasi slipped around the back corner of another tomb, drawing Mitch after her. That put two between them and Lanier.

"You should go," Mitch whispered in her ear.

"You think I believe him?" Stasi whispered incredulously. "He'll let me go when hell freezes over. I'm the one who knows that he hired me to steal the necklace."

Another series of steps. He was coming closer.

"I could get the jump on him."

"And get shot."

She could see Lanier's shadow thrown against the opposite wall, gun extended. No, anybody going for it might take the shot at point blank range.

Instead she backed away, trying to make no sound, pulling Mitch along. At least he seemed soberer. He'd lost his hat, and the shadows through the magnolia branches shifted across his face as she drew him along, tiptoeing among the tombs.

Around another set of tombs, across a path and between the next set. These were newer tombs, only a few decades old. 1890 gleamed out at her from incised marble letters. Larger ones too, providing more shelter. There was no sound. Who knew where Lanier was?

There was a sudden movement ahead and Stasi shrank back.

Not Lanier.

The woman stood in the shadow of a monstrous live oak, beside a marble urn that graced a mausoleum, dark hair falling in ringlets around her face, a fan in her other hand. Her white dress glimmered like moonlight in the dark, and her eyes found Stasi's unerringly as she raised one hand to her neck.

"Who are you?" Stasi whispered.

"My name is Emilie." She tipped her head, the gesture of a coquette in days gone by, as antique as her century-old dress.

"Who are you talking to?" Mitch whispered, looking around.

"The Dead," Stasi said.

The woman took a step closer, stronger and more solid. "I can help you," she said.

"Why would you do that?" Stasi asked, and then she knew. "You're one of the necklace's victims."

"Emilie Rose Angelique Marie Daigle Lanier," she said. "I am the third woman it killed." She took another step closer, her eyes not leaving Stasi's. "I was killed in my theater box by my husband because he thought I had a lover. He lost his temper and stabbed me." She stopped, swaying in her long pale skirts.